I'm getting timeouts too.
PHP is not running in safe mode.
If i change the lastmsg column field in db and re-run gateway.php all i get is a DNS error, a file not found error.

heheh done. :)
Grabbed 30k posts, all at once, and no connection timeout, you just have to fool the browser. :D

d

This hack absolutely rocks. By far this is going to add more functionality to our forums than anything I've seen.

Thank you, thank you THANK YOU!!!

INSTALL............... :banana:

I apologize if this has already been answered here, but this thread is getting long and my searches resulted in no answers.

What I would like to do is have the ability to post a sticky thread into the forum without that one being sent out to the related usenet newsgroup.

I guess this becomes a 2 part question:

1. Can you post a sticky thread and will that screw up the system?

2. Is there a way to post in my forum and not have it be sent out to the public.

(I tried running the setlastmsg thing, but that seems to only work on incoming, not outgoing)

Thanks!

edit: sorry for double posting!

great hack!! :bunny: some questions:

how can I leave out the signatures and user titles when posting to a group ?

edit: and how can I change the quote color ?

and when I look into a thread I can't see the poster name, always just "guest"

Can I ask How did you do this? Mine always timesout. I love this script though.

Another question--I'd like to be able to delete the posts without opening them up first (sometimes I can tell what is spam or unrelated to the topic without opening them) and since I edit the garbage out this would make things much easier. Is there a way?

Question 3:
Is there a way to not include the previous replies, etc. that show up under the users post? A lot of times it is just the same thing over and over in each persons post--and this just seams to take up space. Just wondering... Thanks!

I have another important question:

How can I exclude the newsgroups forums from the search function ??????

First - it?s a really great hack so far and I want to thank the author for sharing it with us.

But as Schorsch mentioned before - most people in serious newsgroups are not very amused by the produced signature.
Couldn?t there be a way that this hack reads out the mail-adress from the database and takes that as signature ? May be like
Not at least I would aprecciate that the mailadress of the poster is his own. Actual the poster-adress in those ng-postings is set to "membername.12345@yourdomain.com - and that?s far from beeing neat if you have a <catchall>-mailfunction running on your domains - never had that much spam before... :surprised: <args>

And beside that other ng-users can calm down.. - actual it?s really producing lots of trouble...

Just my two thoughts - but I think it?s really important.

Marv.

Oups..forgotten: does anybody know if this hack works with the 3.0 RC3 ?

Thx,
Marv.

It'll post a URL to the file on your server.

That won't work. The script currently supports mime encoded attachments but doe snot support uuencoded attachements.

If you go the email route, just set it up to pull the messages from teh pop server and then send the messages to a "dump" address (where it'll be deleted and not delivered). Or just comment out the lines that sends out the email or newsgroup post.

You might be able to create a dummy account and then just set the username and password as variables in teh gateway script so that whenever the gateway script is run it'll use that username and pass.

Sounds like you have your web browser set up incorrectly so that it won't display text files in teh browser window, but instead prompts you to save it.

You need to get the message id number of the last post on your new server, which is unique to each news server and set it in the msgid column so that it'll pull starting from there.

What mail server do you have?

I've been busy working on other projects. Sorry about putting this hack on the back burner.

A sticky thread will work normally (but of course wont be sticky on the news server). To post to the forums and not have it go to the newsgroup, you'll need to make the post and then change the value in the post table to make the gateway script think it was already sent by changing the "isusenetpost" column to 1 for that post.

You'll need to edit the code and change the signature part of it to not have those variables in it.

To change the color, find in the code where it has "[color=blue]" and change those three lines to have the colors you want.

The real email address is not used simply because of email addresses being harvested as spam. What I do on my set up is have a unique domain for the email address used and then set up a catch all for the domain with an auto responder that gives details on how to reply to the user.

- Gilby

Give it a try and let us know! :)

Did you mean 2.3 RC3? IT'd probably work with that one, but might not with 3.0 as many thing may have changed.

Gilby... I must say this was a wonderful hack and I have really enjoyed it on my site...Thanks again.

Oh btw... any plans on adding a way to handle newsgroup attachments with it?

Hi Gilby,

it?s good to see you?re still alive & typing ;)

What you suggested is what I already did. You know that "The good, the bad & the ugly...?" Guess the people on our german newsservers are very familiar with that and they insist to match the standard how a ng-post should be. That?s the reason for all the flames we receive...

And this nationwide standard (uh...have I told you that I?m talking about german newsgroups, yet..?) a post has to have two things:

- a proper emailadress to reach the poster and to retrace the post back to the poster

The second one is the thing I mentioned about the signature.
If a post is delivered to a ng via a gateway there has to be an adress for technical questions or in case of abuse. That?s why I suggested the quoted signature..

Okay...I read that you?ve got other projects and your time to give support to this hack is running out.
Don?t know how to say it...but would it be very impudent to ask you if you could do these minor changes for the europeans here on board .. ? :rolleyes:

I would do it on my own - be sure - but I?m just not good in coding...umm..that means most of the time php looks to me like a bunch of celtic cuneiform script mixed with oxford english.... :alien:

Any chance you could look into it on a short moment between riding your doublewheeled unicycle und the shower ? (Btw: unicycling looks completely arduous the way you do it :) )

Thanks for stopping by !

Yes it does work with 2.3 RC3. I've got it running on a board with about 200,000 posts and it works just fine.

I want to add the cronjob (automatically update news)

What is the command line on a linux server with C-Panel? Just go into the cron jobs tab and then command is simply http://www.mysite.com/forum/gateway.php ? or do i need to add cron or something

Set up a cron job in the cron job areas of cpanel (toward the bottom I believe) - if you want them to run ever 10 minutes you may have to set up multiple jobs - at least for me, I wasn't able to do a 5,15,25 etc. in the minutes column, so I set a separate one up for 5 * * * *, 15 * * * * etc.

use this:

lynx -source http://mysite.com/forums/gateway.php?log=cron >/dev/null

It partially handles them now, just not the uuencoded ones. If you can find some php code that decodes uuencoded text, then it wouldn't be too hard to add.

I'm struggling to keep this hack turned on in my forums. Here is the issue:

Users love the usenet forum that I have included. However, it gets hundreds of posts per day, and they don't like seeing those when they come to the system each day and click to "view new posts".

I have that *almost* fixed, but not quite.

First, I removed the forumid from the search function, so even if it shows new threads and forums since they last visited, all those won't appear when they click to "view new posts"

Next step was to not get new threads and posts to show up. I was able to do the threads part using another guys code example... however, I still haven't found a way around the posts part.

Basically I want the forum to work as usual, except that I don't want any of the posts or threads being counted by anything in the vb system or showing up in views such as this one:

Members: XX, Threads: YY, Posts: ZZ

Is this possible? Perhaps a line of code that is incrementing the post and thread count total can simply be removed?

Thanks...

I uninstalled this hack, same reason like gopherhockey posted above.

I told you about the problems in german newsgroups and about the problem with the email-adresses. This is solved now.
But now I?m struggling with something different.

I noticed that postings which have been send via the gateway don?t have proper headers and - you guessed it - on german newsservers this is like a spike in the flesh and it?s raining flames.

Okay - that?s the prolog..now facts:

mime.php should encode the outgoing posts in line 132 - 177 :
So far mime.php should encode the headers with:
The body should be encoded with MIME, too :
But as As far as I can see mime.php isn?t doing what it should. It doesn?t encode the headers of outgoing posts and it doesn?t encode the body nor it adds the lines
to the headers.

In other words: it seems that it?s doing nothing at all.
Could someone please have a look what?s happening there ? It?s now the third night and actual 3.04 AM and I?m about to go crazy about this thing... :paranoid:


Note:
In my files I changed the values to
because that?s the german nationwide standard.

This from logican from another conversation on possibly making posts invisible that are generated from this hack. Anyone want to try this with this hack??

---

A work around might be using this trick:
Hack your gateway hack so that it posts with a special username (a fake username
that does not belong to any member but a bot). Then you can exclude it in your
query to get accurate results: Eg.


In order to fix this, we need to know how to get the gateway script to post as a user, not as "guest" as it seems Guest is not really treated as a regular account.

Someone else asked the question, but I don't believe anyone has answered it.

Anyone know how to get the script to use a real userid when posting? Say I create a user "NNTPGateway" ??

Thanks - this could POSSIBLY allow me to turn this back on.

I did it... you use the userid instead of username...

To ignore posts totals from the NNTP Newsgroup, simply edit your index.php and change:

to:


If you run a script such as webwelcome where it picks out the number of posts since the user last logged in, just find the line:

and change to:


You can do this for the threadcount as well - just use

thread WHERE forumid!=XX (where XX is the NNTP forum)


Now, I can turn this sucker back on!

Why would I want to use this hack over the original when it lacks features of the original?

What features are lacking?

IMHO this one was much better than the other, but I'm interested to see what you find in the other one that this one doesn't have.

Well:

Does not support separate footers

Does not allow custom email address to be used via the users option

No spam control or string replacement support.

No purging or autoexpire.

So what advantage does this version offer over the original that makes it worth dropping these features?

I'm not all that familiar with the "original" other than that it did not work with my 2.2.9 version and this one did. I also believe the pop3 features (email to a forum and to list) were not available in the other one at the time. Most the other features you list seem to be built into vb, so why would they need to be included in a hack?

I guess if you are so happy with the original, why not just stick with it.

Perhaps someone familiar with both can post here what the difference are. All I know is that this one worked without an issue and does everything I wanted (and more) in an NNTP gateway for vb.

Well I don't have either yet and am trying to make a choice on which to go with. I was hoping someone who has used both could give advise.

What are these POP features then and why would I want them?

Basically, I want to be able to use 4 or 5 newsgroups on my site as forums. I want to have it syncronize with the news server every 10 mins (at longest, maybe less), I want to allow only registered members to post through the board and to have a footer put at the bottom of every post made from the board with a link to the site (e.g "Posted via www.thrill-seekers.net". Im not sure about expiry and deletion of out of date posts, I guess it would be ideal if they were removed from the board when they dropped off the news server, or maybe even if they stayed there for 30 days, then were automatically deleted (with useful threads being manually moved to other forums). Does this sound within the scope of this hack?

This hack does what you are asking. There is a footer stuck in there showing a link to your profile and a link to the thread where the message was posted etc.

Expiring stuff can be handled by vb automatically - you can set how long you want to keep things and purge what you don't wish to keep. (lets you keep things around longer than your server, in case you want it there for reference etc.)

I use the pop3 feature to be able to email directly to a forum. (but only use this sparingly and don't advertise the address to many) - e.g. I subscribe to various sales or subscription emails that are related to my boards content and have those automatically show up in a forum as a post without having to do it manually. SPAM for this is controlled by my own server before it gets to the email account, then the hack pulls the messages using pop3 from my server.

I even set it up so posts going to my forums via NNTP are not counted in the rest of my vb systems statistics, so users aren't flooded with usenet garbage when they log in, but only see actual posts from local (registered) users.

But like I said, I haven't played with the other one much since it did not work for me initially. From what I remember I too compared them and liked some of the features this one had - plus it seems to get more support. I could be wrong, I'm sure the other one is good too. I know you won't go wrong with this one though, it is one of the most useful hacks I have (and may even cause me to wait before upgrading to vb3 until the hack is made compatible)

Hope that helps?